Make Money Online with Backlinks?

The longer I work at this niche site building game then the more obvious it becomes what is really important when it comes to the making money online. It has very little to do with your logo, your stylesheet, your color selection or anything of that nature. Sure those things have their place, but they are pretty low on the totem pole for the types of niche sites that we build.

What you need are backlinks. Backlinks are absolutely crucial to Making Money Online.

Know Your Customer

I don’t think anyone would argue that one of the keys to making money in any business is to know your customers. When it comes to niche sites, what you want to know is what they are looking for and how they got there. These two factors are critical when developing niche sites.

Blog readers are “recreational” readers and what I mean by that is they are here to read something for entertainment. They are no necessarily here for any other purpose than to check out what you have to say. A search engine (niche site) reader is a very focused visitor. They are searching for something specific, they entered keywords into Google and if you are lucky (or good), your site was the one that came up.

Once there, you either have what they want or you don’t. They will move on and likely won’t be back for quite some time, if ever. You solved their problem or you didn’t.

Cater to Your Customer

So knowing who your customer is was the easy part, when it comes to niche sites, your customer is the search engine user. The hard part is how do you get them to your site instead of one of the millions of others out there.

One of the most overlooked issues when it comes to building search engine traffic is backlinks. Backlinks play a large part in how much authority Google gives your site. The more relevant backlinks you have from quality sites, then the more authority you earn from Google. The more authority you have via Google, then the better you will place in SERPS.

This seems to be one of the many mistakes that most novice niche site builders make. I see example after example in the BANS forums of people complaining about not making any money with Bans. They often blame EPN but on the odd chance that any of them will offer up a URL to look at, the site has no pagerank, no backlinks, is barely indexed and is simply a mess.

If your target customer is a Search Engine customer then you simply must have a solid game plan when it comes to your SEO. It isn’t as hard as everyone thinks and if you stick to the basics and execute them well, then you will probably do better than most.

Backlinks aren’t the answer to it all, but they are a critical part of the overall machine. You still need solid onsite SEO to rank well but backlinks take time to build, so I deem them to be the most important. You can fix your keywords, meta tags, H(x) tags overnight, but backlinks take weeks and even months to build.

How To Build Backlinks

How to build backlinks is the part that most people stumble on. Even when they finally do realize how important backlinks are, they will stop at this point. They might comment on a few blogs here or there or even submit to a Directory or two but that’s about it.

Depending on the niche, I can tell you a few PR0 blog comments and a few directory listings will not gain you anything, especially if you are in a competitive niche. Your competitors that do understand link building will own the front page of Google and your site will be buried.

This topic is one that has a number of different methods and techniques and would really require several different blog posts to cover it thoroughly. Some people reading this site might be interested in niche sites while others could care less. Rather than boring those who aren’t interested, I decided to start a newsletter to cover the stuff that I do when building niche sites.

So if you want to find out how I build back links, you can wait around until I write another post about it or you can subscribe to my newsletter and we’ll get started. You can subscribe at the top of the blog under the logo where it says Free Newsletter.  This newsletter will focus almost entirely on niche site creation using both Wordpress and the BANS software. I will still blog about these topics from time to time but if you want to see it all then subscribe to my newsletter today.

To thank you for signing up I am going to give you a free copy of Brad Callen’s “Google Adwords Made Easy” for your review. Adwords might not be your thing but this book is an absolute WEALTH of information when it comes to keyword selection and marketing principles in general. If you aren’t familiar with Brad’s work, then he puts out some of the absolute best stuff on the internet. Bar none.

That’s it for now…sign up for my newsletter, get a free copy of an awesome e-book and we’ll start climbing the SERP rankings together. You will make far more money at the top of the Google index than you will buried on page 10.

The choice is yours.